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Beyond the Epicures, there is another line in Hoyo de Monterrey: the Serie le Hoyo. A reader, distressed by the perpetualmediocrity that this season’s vertical has put me through, suggested that I should try something from the Le Hoyo range, and presented me with this example, a Le Hoyo des Dieux.

“Are you a big Hoyo fan?” I asked, worried that I may have offended a man of otherwise impeccable taste (and ready with my follow-up question, “how could anybody like this muck?”). “Not really,” he shrugged. “But I like the Des Dieux.”

The cigar begins nicely enough, although it’s not as far from the Hoyo trope as I would like. It’s mild, with that woody, cedar taste, and a very strong grass note. Beneath it all there is something lactic, which in and of itself is a big improvement over the rest of the Hoyo marque.

We are drinking that prince of drinks, the Sazerac. It’s a drink I’ve been ordering once in a while for many years. In the early 2000s, before Mad Men re-popularized vintage alcoholism, and before I was really secure in my masculinity, ordering cocktails was a dangerous affair. It was the dying days of the liqueur era, and all around was saccharine sweet; every drink on every menu made of Galliano, Chambord and Frangelico, served in a hurricane glass with fruit and whipped cream spilling out of the top.

Once, seeing me agonizing over a particularly treacherous menu, a bartender offered to make me a special, and the thing that came back was a Sazerac. I didn’t care much for it, my boyish palate still too soft for hard liquor, but I persisted, and have ordered them occasionally ever since. A safe choice. Slightly watered down, lightly sweetened whiskey. Something every bartender knows that sounds a bit more sophisticated than an Old Fashioned when you ask for it.

It was more or less a year ago to the day that my host showed me the true potential of the Sazerac. When he makes them they are smooth and sweet, with only the slightest twinge of alcohol burn. Beyond all else there is a butteriness to them; they warm the throat like an alcoholic Butter Menthol. Divine. A prince among drinks.

By about the midpoint, the lactation has increased to the point where cream is the dominant flavour in the cigar. There is still some wood on the back end (it is a Hoyo, after all), but mostly it is cream. The tobacco taste is very light, with not a hint of spice or bitterness.

The first step to making a good Sazerac is to select the right glass: you want to contain the volume of the drink (about 75ml) and nothing more. This is no place for a balloon glass.

Next, pour in a little absinth. 5, maybe 10ml. You want an absinth with some staying power. My host uses Doubs, but anything a bit serious will do. Not Green Fairy.

Fill the glass to the brim with water and set it in the freezer for 45 minutes. For this reason alone, a Sazerac is good for the first drink of the night. Have the glasses in the freezer so that they’re ready to go as soon as she walks in the door. After 45 minutes, the glass will have the start of a thin skin of ice. Serve only to punctual guests. If she’s an hour and a half late then you’ll have to wait until the absinth ice-cubes at least partially thaw.

(The object of all this is to chill the glass and to coat the inside evenly with a light amount of the absinth. The hurried tapster could theoretically get away with leaving the glass only a few minutes, or perhaps not chilling it at all. As in all things though, if you can take the time, you should.)

When the glasses are about chilled, make the bulk of the drink. In a cocktail tin, mix two shots of good cognac, with 10ml of simple syrup and three dashes of Peychaud’s Bitters. When it comes down to it, this drink is basically a glass of cognac, so you should use something drinkable. My host uses Hennessey VSOP. In many bars, they use one part of rye whiskey to one part cognac. This is one of the many reasons most bartenders fail at this drink.

The most important step is the stirring. Add to your tin a few large lumps of ice. Large lumps melt slower and are more forgiving. Stir the drink with a bar spoon until it is exactly as cold and diluted as it needs to be. How to tell when that is? Well, therein lies the skill of the Sazerac; the thing that sets it apart from the Old Fashioned or the Alaska or any other glass of lightly sweetened hard liquor. For me, it is always about ten turns of the spoon longer than I think it should be. Stir too little and your Sazerac will still have the alcohol burn. Still too much and it will taste watery.

With the drink ready to go, take the glasses out of the freezer, and toss the contents dramatically down the sink. Hold one glass under her nose. She’ll wrinkle it. “Black jellybeans?”

Strain the tin into the glasses, filling a bare half millimetre below the rim. The drink will be a glorious Chuck Berry red. Drop a lightly coiled lemon twist into each glass. The liquid should now be forming a meniscus. Take a second piece of lemon peel and squeeze some of its oils over the surface of the drink. Spritz a little more on the outside of the glass, where the hand will sit. On the stem if you’re using stemware.

Serve carefully and drink with purpose.

The Le Hoyo des Dieux ends very respectably, with a slight strengthening of the tobacco note, but no tar or anything objectionable. Perhaps it’s the liquor, or the company, or the warm summer sun, but the Dieux has been a very pleasant smoke. It is a Hoyo, and it has all the family traits. It’s light and woody and not overly complex. What is there is good, however, and I rank it above all its predecessors in the round-up.

Hailing from 2004, the Hoyo de Monterrey Petite Robustos was a trendsetter for the brand, and for Habanos generally. At release it was the first of its vitola, both salida and galera; the first front-line skirmisher of the short-and-fat brigade that would come to dominate the new release lists for the next fifteen years.

To me, the petite robusto has always looked a little off, its girth heralding a grander cigar than the length can deliver, and begging the question, “where’s the rest?” Lit, it is bitter from the start, with an acrid woody tang. I set it down a moment, and it calms down a bit, relaxing into light wood and medium tobacco.

I’ve known a few delinquents in my time, but rarely have I been in as close contact with the criminal element as I was with Simon Cates in the summer of ‘aught five. It was six months into my relationship with Audrey (and about two years before the Parisian Encounter). We both lived with our respective parents, but that summer hers had gone to Europe on The Trip of a Lifetime – three months riding the canals of Germany, France and the Netherlands – and Audrey and I were playing house.

Audrey had a summer job as a research assistant, which kept her busy for most of the daylight hours. I had no need of a job, having emancipated myself from my parents a year or so prior, which made me eligible for the government cheques. I spent my days mainly playing video games in her father’s study. The long summer days also gave me plenty of opportunity to bond with the house’s other resident layabout, Audrey’s eighteen-year-old brother, Simon (Simmy, to his friends).

They were siblings, and had similar noses, but that was about it. Audrey had attended an exclusive private school for gifted girls. She spoke with a vestigial British accent, and her friends were snobbish pseudo-intellectuals. Simmy had attended the local high school, and spoke with the languid drawl of a suburban thug, and his friends did the same. Audrey was blonde, with clear blue eyes and porcelain skin. She was against all physical activity, and deemed ballgames the pastime of the troglodyte. Simmy was tan and swarthy, and a natural athlete. Above all, Audrey was a member of society, and followed society’s rules. For Simmy there was no such thing.

The house was built into the side of a hill, and sprawled over three floors. Audrey and I occupied what was normally her parents’ domain on the top level. The bottom floor was Simmy territory. The open kitchen and dining room on the middle level were common property.

I rarely ventured down into Simmy’s crypt, but whenever I did the scene was much the same. He would be shirtless, reclined on the couch. Draped nearby would be Kate, his impossibly long-legged high-school girlfriend, clad only in one of Simmy’s basketball singlets and a blissful post-coital expression. His tubby friend Dave would be lying on the floor. The television would be playing an action movie, and all about would be strewn bongs and nangs and packets of chips. The marijuana scent was palpable, and as his parent’s return drew closer he would become increasingly concerned about how irreparably it had penetrated the soft furnishings.

On the second day of my residence, I was aroused from my Grand Theft Auto by a commotion on the kitchen deck. Investigating, I found Simmy and Dave in the process of heaving the family microwave over the railing to the lawn below. They had chanced upon a crime of opportunity: an open truck full of brand new microwaves, and helped themselves. I suggested that instead of destroying their parents’ perfectly serviceable microwave, they could sell either it or the new one for cash, but they weren’t interested. I then offered the idea that they could destroy it in a more spectacular fashion by microwaving a deodorant can or something. They thought about that one, but decided it was too much trouble, and over the railing the appliance went. Dented but largely intact, it would stay on the lawn until the night before his parents came back.

Audrey and I were both fending for ourselves for the first time, and were shocked by how expensive grocery bills could be. When we went shopping we were frugal, buying simple meals, and mostly cooking ourselves. For Simmy though the world was his oyster. Several times a week he and his friends would come home fully laden with purloined frozen meals and meats and candies and every delicacy of the suburban supermarket. I was amazed every time. For myself, I couldn’t see how it was possible to heist more than a chocolate bar, but Simmy seemed to be able to liberate the weekly shop for a family of ten. When I asked him how he did it he was nonchalant. “Just carry it out” he told me. “Nobody cares.”

With the third of so of the cigar combusted, the bitterness has left, but what remains is very much the par three hole of the Monterrey course. Mostly it tastes of cedar dust, with a mild herbaceous twang in the aftertaste.

Audrey was universally disapproving of Simmy and his antics, but I became something of a friend to him and his buddies, not exactly approving, but definitely impressed. More than anything I was fascinated by a life so free of societal norms. One afternoon Simmy knocked on my study door clutching a little medical pouch. “Hey mate” he asked, “do you know how to fill up a needle?”

As it happened I did, having acquired the skill while caring for my family’s diabetic dog. Simmy had gotten his hands on some steroid injections, and wanted me help him shoot them into the meaty part of his buttock. For the next two weeks it became a ritual for us – he would come by after lunch, usually – and I would give him his injection. Eventually he gave it up because he wasn’t working out enough to see the benefit.

Halfway through the summer he came to Audrey and I and announced with great pride that he’d gotten a job. Starting Monday he was the new night watchman at the Tennis Centre. Audrey was pleased, although in bed that night we privately wondered if Rod Laver knew he was employing a fox to guard his henhouse. It took Simmy only three shifts to figure out how to turn off the cameras and open up the pro-store, and after that he would come home every morning with thousands of dollars’ worth of sneakers and racquets. As always with Simmy, there wasn’t any consequence. When he was fired some months later it was for absenteeism, not for thievery.

Audrey and I broke up not long after the end of the summer. After her parents came home she had wanted us to find our own place together, but I was content to go back to my folks’ place, where the groceries came gratis. We would reconcile for a time a few years later, but eventually parted for good. Last I heard, Simmy had done a few months in prison in his twenties for low-level drug dealing, but eventually straightened out, working a variety of labourer jobs before starting a landscape gardening business. He eventually married Kate, too, high-school sweethearts, and fathered twin girls. No word on what became of Dave.

The Petite Robustos lightens up considerably in the bottom half of the cigar, but doesn’t gain a lot in the way of complexity, with the usual wood, grass, and slight tang predominating.

The marketing impetus behind the short and fat revolution is that nobody has the time to smoke big cigars any more. To some extent, the marketeers have a point. Gone are the days of smoking in offices, in gentlemen’s clubs, in restaurants and bars, and other places where men might once have engaged in otherwise meaningful activity with a Churchill clamped between their teeth. The aficionado will always find a way to luxuriate at home with a big cigar, but for the habitual smoker, who smokes two, and four, and five a day, they need it short and to some extent they need it fat. Something to suck down while driving between landscape gardening jobs. In that capacity, the Hoyo Petite Robusto succeeds. It’s an easy-going, uncomplicated sort of smoke that you could get down in 30 minutes if you put your mind to it.

The Hoyo de Monterrey Epicure Especial made its first appearance in 2004 as an Edition Limitada, where it proved so popular that they made it a regular production four years later. It was ahead of its time; the third example of the Gorditos vitola, a size which has appeared in the “new releases” column of the Habanos catalogue fifteen times since, and continues to resurface on an annual basis. I wondered at the time why they called it the Epicure Especial, and not the Epicure No. 3, which seemed to me a more logical name for a cigar that was basically a longer Epicure No. 2. Whatever their reasoning was I guess it worked for them, as they have continued the trend with the Double Epicure, the Grand Epicure, and the Epicure de Luxe.

I light her up. Construction is not great, with a wind tunnel draw that makes the initial burn far too hot, the smoke bitter as a result. Hopefully it will clean up as things stabilize. What flavor notes there are are woody and slightly chemical. Treated pine.

I met Saskiri Sutrisno online. Her profile was vague. She liked some TV shows. She liked to travel. Her pictures, all close-ups with big sunglasses, gave little indication of how she looked. She was enthusiastic, though, when she reached out to me and gushed about the bombastic essay that I used to promote my own eligibility. Enthusiasm goes a long way. It was a clear case for a low stakes internet date.

We met on a Tuesday night outside the State Library, because it’s a public place that everybody knows and because there’s nothing to do there. If you hate each other from the first moment then you’re not even committed to finishing your coffee. It was a Tuesday because nobody has anything better to do on a Tuesday.

We went to a nearby bar and immediately hit it off. She had been raised a diplo-brat, the child of a big wheel in the Indonesian kleptocracy of the 1980s and 90s, and we swapped stories about our childhoods in diplomatic enclaves. She laughed and smiled, with a big, wet mouth, and eyes to match. I liked her summer dress.

After the bar the date carried on to a restaurant, where the casual touching started; the clasp of the hand on the table to emphasize a point, the faux sympathetic shoulder pat. On the way to the third bar I held her hand. “Good move,” she whispered.

By the time the third bar closed it was a quarter passed midnight and we were two martinis passed sensible. We necked heavily in an alleyway.

Through the fog of Wednesday morning, I related the story to a friend. “I think this could be the one,” I told him. “She’s funny and smart and beautiful. She’s got Indonesian gangster money. Relax and Rolex.”

True to expectation, the cigar has mellowed off considerably. There are notes of straw and cedar, with light dry earth and dust. There is a vague peanut flavor in the late taste. Some salt.

For the most part, my affair with Saskiri was a lot of fun. She worked in finance at one of those jobs where everyone is young and bubbly and drinks late every night. She fell for that old routine, the one where I throw on a robe and casually put together cocktails in my grand apartment. She lived in the hipster area, and we had nice breakfasts and sneered cynically at everything. She had a fun set of nicknames: Sass, Sassafrass, Sasquatch, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. Once, she crashed one of my work functions just as it was winding down, and smiled and laughed and enthralled the older guys. “Who was that girl?” my boss asked me the next morning. “An old friend?”
“Ah…no” I replied. “More of a new friend.”

I wasn’t wrong about the gangster money, either. She showed me pictures of herself at age four, being bounced on Suharto’s knee. Then came the family portrait: ten Sutrisnos and twenty staff, all in their Sunday best outside an ambassadorial residence. The women and girls wore matching white dresses. The men and boys were in suits and brandished AK-47s.

But then, there were the problems.

Most of them were minor. She snored like a rhinoceros. She had terrible taste in movies. She was always on her phone. And, of course, that old complaint started to surface; the one that has driven most every lover from my life. She liked me, and she needed to express that to me, and to hear it expressed in return. The needier she got the less my broken psychology wanted to validated her.

The final straw came on July 1. It was a Wednesday, and she was celebrating Canada Day at a bar near my house. She texted me repeatedly, asking me to join her. When I finally arrived she was drunk, and slurring her words, and going on and on about how she couldn’t believe two of her friends had hooked up. It wasn’t the event for me, and inside an hour I was ready to go. When I told her so, and a twenty-minute song-and-dance ensued about whether or not she would come to my house. Her complex iterations of logistics are lost on me even today, but basically, I felt that as we both had busy days the next day, the dominant strategy would be for her to come and be intimate for an hour or so, and then get a cab home; she was steadfast that she was only coming to my house if she could stay the night.

She fell asleep immediately post-coitus, stealing all the blanket and snoring at the volume of industrial machinery. Several times I tried to wake her, or roll her over, or to smother her, but it was all in vain, and by 3am I abandoned my bed and went to sleep in the spare room. There I slept soundly until five, when she shook me awake. “What are you doing in here?” she asked. “Was I snoring?” I moaned concurrence. “Oh my god,” she said. “I’m so sorry.” She climbed into bed with me, the spare room’s single considerably less accommodating than my king, and fell asleep at once, immediately resuming her cacophony.

I was curt with her in the morning. She was sheepish, and knew she was in trouble. Once she’d gone I went upstairs to make the beds, and discovered that both sheets were heavily bloodstained. She had a cut on her leg, that apparently had opened up.

It was the final straw, and when she sheepishly texted me three days later, I let her know that it was over. She didn’t reply, but a few hours later I noticed she’d unfriended me on Facebook.

The Epicure Especial ends a little spicy, with a sharp tar that is not altogether unpleasant. There is still some dry dirt in the aftertaste. A few weeks ago, a friend, having read the first few of this season’s Dusky Beauties observed to me that Hoyo might be a bit mild for my taste. I’m sorry to say it, but I think he might be right. Hopefully there is some gold deeper in the limiteds, because as far as the regular production goes, it all seems to be much of the same.

In The Harem, where cigars are rarely combusted before their fifth birthdays, and often not before their fifteenth, today’s beauty is a comparative rarity; the Hoyo de Monterrey Elegantes is part of the La Casa del Habano exclusive program, and was scheduled for release in 2016. Naturally, it did not actually begin appearing in stores until 2017, and the single I purchased at retail wasn’t even from the first batch. From factory to fire in less than six months! Unheard of.

True to its name, it’s an elegant cigar, topping out at 47 ring gauge, but feeling thinner on account of the perfecto format. The wrapper is smooth chestnut. Whoever put the band on had a little trouble with the tapered tip: the fit is awkward, and you can clearly see the overlap. Lit, the cigar is punchy from the get go: bitter, and acridly herbal, with strong tannic and woody notes. Somewhere in there is something slightly fungal. Shitake mushrooms.

Being the height of Melbourne’s summer, the weather has taken a turn. The sky is overcast, and a chill breeze is coming in from the south. My winter coats are deep in the mothballs, and going in after them this early in the year would seem too much like giving up. My autumnal coat though? Seemed doable. It’s a very simple, Loden-wool chesterfield, cut to the mid-thigh. It first came into my possession in the mid-90s, when I was about 14, and going through a phase. A phase where I wanted a trench-coat.

I wanted it long and black and preferably leather. I wanted a collar I could flip up as high as my ears. I wanted to drop a caustic one-liner, flick my cigarette into the wind, and swoosh off into the night. The Matrix hadn’t come out yet, so I guess I must have seen The Crow or something. I suggested to my parents that they could buy me one for my birthday, and they flatly refused. That Sunday, at dinner at my grandparents’ house, my mother even brought it up as a joke. “Do you know what Alexander wants for his birthday?” She hooted. “A trench-coat!” My grandmother’s eyes lit up immediately. “I’ve got just the thing!”

She scurried to the back bedroom, and pulled my coat from the cupboard. “I hate this horrible thing” she declared. My grandfather glared, but said nothing. My mother gushed over the quality, which is very fine, and I accepted it somewhat begrudgingly. It was not at all what I wanted; a plain, old-man’s autumnal coat. I wasn’t nearly long or leather enough. On the ride home I mused out loud about the possibility of dying it back. “Oh, you mustn’t,” my mother said. “You’ll ruin it.”

After the bulge has burned away, the cigar grows mild, with cedar notes predominating. A straw taste has emerged, and there is still that slight musty element of forest floor. The burn is perfect.

My grandmother’s demise was fairly swift, as far as demises go. She was eighty-nine, and a routine doctor’s visit showed a lump on her liver. A biopsy declared it cancerous and rapidly spreading. She was sent more or less immediately to hospital, and after two weeks as an inpatient she was transferred to a hospice, where a few days later she would die.

The last time I saw her was in the hospital. It was the only occasion in my adult life that I ever remember being alone with her, and the only time I ever conversed with her person-to-person, as equals. She was taking a medication that was making her hallucinate, especially at night, and I discussed the experience at length with her, trying to give her some insight from my own misspent youth, when I had been through the same thing recreationally. Eventually the nurse came in, and it was time for me to go. As she was being bolstered up, my grandmother looked at me slyly and added one last thing in parting. “You know,” she said. “He’s never forgiven me for giving you that coat.”

At this point I had had the coat for fifteen years, and although my tastes had matured enough that I could appreciate it, I still wore it only rarely. There’s simply not that many days in a year that call for an autumnal coat. It had acquired a few knocks over the decades – it was missing a button, and the lining had come away in places – and I resolved to set things right. I would get it fixed up and return it to my grandfather.

Into the final third, the cigar as strengthened again. Still, the predominant note is cedar, and fresh cut branches. It’s slightly nutty. Walnuts.

After my grandmother died, my grandfather always seemed a bit lost. He lived until he was ninety-seven, and I think in the last few years more or less everyone he knew had died. He stayed in his own home, stubbornly independent, and pottered around, working on little projects and watching a lot of old TV. My grandmother had always done the cooking and the cleaning and so on, and he didn’t care much for those jobs, living on microwave dinners and letting the dishes pile up in the sink. He had to endure his daughters reversing the parental relationship, nagging him to eat better and clean up after himself, and bossing him around about his appointments and so on.

It took me about five years, but eventually I gave the coat back. I had it dry-cleaned and repaired, and it looked as good as the day I had acquired it. My parents were going over to my grandfather’s house for dinner, and I joined them, which was rare for me. I presented him the coat, and explained the story about my grandmother’s death bed. He claimed not to remember it, but nonetheless I felt like I had done the right thing. I had put something right that once was wrong.

It was almost exactly a week later that he died. My aunt was at his house, and was going to take him out for dinner. He was in the next room when she heard him fall. Mentally and physically he was fine, and in the family we had every expectation that he would reach a century, but in that one moment his heart just stopped beating. The paramedic said he would have been dead before he hit the floor.

A month later the family gather at the old house to divide up the estate, each of us placing stickers on the things we wanted. The coat was folded over the back of the dining chair, exactly where I’d left it. It got my first sticker.

The cigar gets a little bitter towards the end, but never too bad; it isn’t the bitter chocolate and heavy tobacco end that I relish, but nor is it the sharp, saliva inducing tar that finishes off inferior cigars. The Elegantes falls pretty squarely in type for Hoyo de Monterrey: it is light to medium strength, woody, with bit of grass and not too much else. If I had to rank it, and eventually I shall, it will probably find its place above the Epicure 2 and below the Regalos. It’s a narrow field though.

It is the morning after the night before, and the well-trodden path has taken me to a shady nook in the Brisbane Botanical Gardens. It seemed very implausible to me that smoking would be allowed here, and certainly nobody else seems to be doing it, but on careful study of the rules board I found no prohibition. The sky is a flawless blue. A gentle tropical breeze takes the edge off the Australian sun. On the river, boats silently putter back and forth, and on the boardwalk girls stroll languidly by, tan legs flashing beneath summer dresses. One cannot imagine a better situation for a cigar smoker to find himself in.

The Hoyo de Monterrey Regalos is one of the 2007 EdiciónLimitadas, and as far as I recall it’s considered largely forgettable, or at least, people largely have forgotten it. I haven’t seen a review of one of these in five years or more, and the ones when it came out weren’t glowing. Still, time changes cigars. It may have come into its own. Ignited, the opening of the cigar has a sharp bite, with musty, fungal undertones, and a good amount of dry straw. There is a bitterness there that I strongly suspect will become cocoa before too long. The tobacco strength is on the higher end of medium.

The reason for my trip for Brisbane – the aforementioned night before – was the Havanathon; a bi-annual bacchanal hosted by a local cigar retailer. It takes place in the shed that doubles as his headquarters, and consists of about two hundred large men carousing as only large men can. Four cigars apiece are included with admission, as is a buffet lunch, all the beer you can stomach, some lightly mixed mojitos and heavily mixed sangria.

The whole thing has the atmosphere of an extended buck’s night: a testosterone fuelled carnival of masculinity. There were waitresses in sequined bikinis, and the throng ogled them unabashedly. One of the girls seemed to be enjoying herself, or at least she was enough of a professional to pretend, all smiles and banter as she handed out the beers. On her buttock there was a tattooed lipstick mark, and she giggled coquettishly as guys posed as if they had just planted it. The other girl was less pleased with her lot in life, plonking each bottle down with a sneer, and shooting a poison glare at anyone who talked to her with anything more than a drink order. “She’d be pretty if she wasn’t such a bitch” a colleague observed to me. “That’s what makes her pretty,” another rejoindered.

About a third in, and the cigar has mellowed, yet still the mustiness predominates, with a strong hint of a closet in a ramshackle ‘70s beach house. I’m sipping a Bundaberg Ginger Beer (luckily, the 7-11 didn’t carry the rum), and its sweetness takes any harshness from the cigar very nicely.

As the afternoon wore on, the shed grew stifling, as much from the combusted phlogiston of a few hundred Habanos as from the tropical sun beating on its iron. Most of the attendees migrated out the front, where the breeze provided welcome respite from the heat, even as it striped us of our ability to sustain a coal.

Soon our host called us back inside, where a trio of salsa dancers had materialised, all high kicks and swivelling hips. After a few numbers they lead us in a dance lesson, the moves to which more resembled the Hokey Pokey than the serpentine writhing they had shown us a few moments before. It ended with a conga line through the shed and out into the street. Cigar smokers have their talents: each of these men can hold down a drink, tell a tall tale, and wax lyrical about the tannic sting on the back-palate, but dancers they are not.

The afternoon wore on in much the same fashion: ribald conversation with the brothers of the leaf, punctuated by musical acts. By 6:00pm, with the third cigar fully combusted, my head was spinning from the nicotine and I needed a break. The crowd was starting to thin a bit, with most of the locals heading home to their lives. The men who stayed were the ones from interstate: true degenerates, with nowhere better to be. I stayed outside for about an hour, holding my fourth cigar, but leaving it unlit. The evening air cleared my head. I ate a light dinner of cold meats leftover from lunch, and drank more than one glass of water.

Into the final stretch and the cigar is firmly in the mid-strength. There is a strong tannic sting on the back-palate. The fungal mustiness has given way to muddy earth tones. The forecast cocoa has failed to eventuate.

The conclusion to the evening, naturally, was the karaoke contest. In Melbourne today, karaoke is somewhat popular. The expanding Asian influence of the last few decades has opened the bars, and those have gradually permeated the broader Australian culture, to the point where most youths of bar-hopping age would have had cause to belt out a rendition of Don’t Stop Believing on at least a few occasions. This was not always so. Even in my own salad days, karaoke was confined to the rare Wednesday night at the pub. At the Havanathon, where I fell on the younger end of the age scale, the level of experience was not high, and volunteers were few and far between.

The MC filled in the blanks with Elvis numbers, and a friend who is in a band gave us some very passable versions of ‘80s pop-songs, but after that the roster started to run dry. Eventually the MC took to wandering through the hall, offering each person the microphone, and declaring “pussy” when they turned it down. When he offered it to me I lingered for a second, then accepted.

My own karaoke repertoire was honed not with Australian youths, but with Japanese barflies. They have a machine over there that gives you an estimate of the amount of kilocalories you expended during your track, the algorithm for which seems to be based mainly on how loud you sing and how much your voice cracks. It trained me into a one trick pony: I sing power ballads and pretend to cry. It is an act utterly unsuited for this room, but nonetheless, I performed it, belting out Total Eclipse of the Heart with all I had, my voice mellifluous after three and a half cigars. Occasionally through screwed up eyes I would glance out at the crowed, who watched, stony-faced, unsure of what to make of the performance art. “Are you okay?” someone asked me after. “Just passionate,” I told him.

By ten the host had had enough, and led the assembled in a rousing chorus of that most proud Australian anthem, Thunderstruck, before turning on the lights. The stragglers stacked the chairs and stole the lighters, and embraced one another warmly. “Till next time, brother.” “Next year in Havana.”

There was an after party, of course, and a fifth cigar, and then a sixth, and somewhere along the way I found some Port wine, and somewhere else some KFC Popcorn Chicken. By four AM I was in bed, the fourteen hours of heavy drinking just enough to drown out the nicotine and put me straight to sleep.

The cigar ends nicely, never bitter, but still with the dry, musty note that has predominated throughout. In the end there is nothing wrong with the Regalos, but when I tell the story of this afternoon, the details I relate will be of the bush turkey scratching in the dirt at my feet, and how he puffed his chest, and then charged, head lowered, to drive off flock of Ibis who came too near; of the big lizard who emerged from the brush to sun himself on the road, and almost got clipped by a cyclist; and of the two Japanese girls, who strolled by languidly, wrinkling their noses at the smell of my cigar. The Regalos, alas, is ultimately forgettable. The Havanathon, not so much.

Your intrepid reporter is deep in the jungles of Northern Australia, where the white noise of the cicadas is loud enough to make conversation difficult. My hostel has the aspect of a safari lodge: the bar is a few roughhewn wooden benches under a great green tarpaulin, strung between three ancient trees. My fellow travellers all speak with different accents, none of them Australian.

The place bills itself as a ‘wilderness retreat.’ My room, some fifty meters away down a narrow path through the dense foliage, is a meagre hut, with flyscreen walls and a tarpaulin roof. There is no power after they shut the generator off at 10pm. We are several hours north of the nearest mobile phone coverage, and there is a sign by the bar that gently advises us not to bother enquiring about the WiFi: “The best connection you can make” it suggests, “is with each other.”

I feel like there is no better way to bond with my compatriots than by lighting up a cigar: after all, what could a bunch of eco-tourists possibly object to about a Cuban cigar, the most natural product on earth?

Like its thinner sister, the Hoyo de Monterrey Epicure No. 2 is an ancient cigar, having survived since the revolution. Once upon a simpler time, these came in cabinets of 50, and wore no bands. Since 2008 they have two, giving this example less age than that. It is the oldest of the still extant robustos, an early forebear of the fat-cigar trend.

As an accompaniment, I order a glass of the highest shelf local spirit in the house: Bundaberg Black, neat. The bartender makes a show of carefully measuring out the shot. “You don’t want me to give you too much of this stuff, mate.”

He’s not wrong. Pure gasoline.

Set ablaze, the cigar opens in a pleasant but inoffensive manner. The predominate flavour is mid-strength tobacco, tending towards mild. It is grassy, with strong notes of hay, accompanied by saddle leather and a hint of wet animal, to complete the barnyard melange.

I arrived in the jungle yesterday, and slept only fitfully: not only is there the constant cacophony of the cicadas, which only the mating calls of the bush turkeys and cassowaries can break through, but also every ten minutes a nut falls from the tree above my hut and lands on the tarpaulin like a gunshot. My wakeup-call this morning came in the form of a marsupial mouse, who crawled onto my pillow from places unknown. I was dozing when I felt his hot breath in my ear, and inquisitively rolled over to find us face to face. With a primal yawp I leapt out of bed, and he fled. Unable to locate either the point of the critter’s entry or of his exit, I decided the best strategy was to vacate the hut myself. On the porch I found a four-foot iguana, and I encouraged him inside to ferret out the rodent, but the slovenly lizard didn’t seem interested.

By midday I found myself in the local swimming hole. Some kids were downstream of us, swinging off a rope, laughing, and cursing like sailors at their disobedient Blue Heeler, Gypsy. Eventually they left, with most of them roaring off in their beaten up four-wheel drive. One of their number, however, came towards us to collect his things – a towel and a short digeridoo – that lay on the river bank near where we were swimming.

He was a lanky teen, with a pile of red hair. His skin was parchment white; his pants would have been a similar tone, but had been rendered transparent by the water, making the chestnut thatch of his mons pubis distractingly visible. He hailed us from the shore with a ponderous drawl of the Australian bush philosopher.

“Youse from around here?”

I told him I was from Melbourne, and he sighed.

“I don’t like the city” he told us. “I’m from the Daintree, born and raised for nineteen years. I went to Sydney once. I thought the jungle had made me a man, but that city made me a little boy.”

My companion is from California, and she told him so, and he seemed to like that a little better. “Yeah, I reckon that’d be alright. I reckon California would be like the Daintree.”

I laughed, and told him that I’d been to both, and they were similar. “Wouldn’t you like to go somewhere a little different though? See the world?”

“Why would I ever want to go anywhere else, when it’s so beautiful here?”

I asked about his digeridoo. “Oh, I love me dige,” he told us. “Can I play you a tune?”

The lad was good, conjuring from the dige at least as tonal a sound as I’ve ever heard from one, with a syncopated section reminiscent of an electronic dance track. For his finale he plunged the end of the stick into the water of the creek, slowly pushing it deeper and deeper, muffling the sound, but creating a maelstrom of bubbles around it. Finally, he withdrew it, gasping for air.

“I do that to improve my lungs” he told us. “If I could play my full size dige when it was all the way in the water like that, I’d have the strongest lungs in Australia.”

Just past the midway point the cigar starts to get bitter and ashy, but is somewhat redeemed by a very mild sweetness on the aftertaste. The flavours, in the rare place where anything definable penetrates the bitterness, are much unchanged: tobacco and dry grass. Some cedar.

Without warning the heavens open, a torrential downpour that pounds on the tarpaulin roof, competing with the white noise of the jungle. The low-point of the roof is nearby, forming a spout where the rain cascades off like a waterfall. A fast-flowing creek immediately forms on the ground beneath, disappearing off into the bush. Toads emerge, seemingly from nowhere, splashing about on the riverbank.

Within fifteen minutes it is over, and the air returns to its regular warm and humid state. The bush turkeys resume their cries.

The final inch of the cigar reveals the life in the thing. The tobacco grows from medium toward strong. The sharp bitterness is gone, replaced by the richer, and much more pleasant bitterness of heavy tar, with nuttiness (peanuts), and some tropical fruit notes in the back of the thing.

Hoyo de Monterrey Epicure No. 2 is not a terrible cigar by any means, but nor is there especially much too it. I’d take it before the Epicure No. 1, but it still runs a distant second to Partagás Serie D No. 4.

The passage of time, my friends, is inevitable. Grains of sand, crushed from once mighty mountains, cannot help but fall through the neck of the hourglass; the quartz crystal inevitably resonates with precise frequency when an electrical current is supplied; and my own Omega Seamaster’s mainspring coils and uncoils with much the same rhythm today as it did when my grandfather first wore it in 1969. Eighteen months have passed since we last spoke. Battles have been won and lost. Loves have come and gone. And Dusky Beauties, has returned.

Hoyo de Monterrey is the least of the big five global brands, and it’s not one I have terribly much affection for. The name translates to “the Hole of Monterrey,” and refers to a valley in Cuba, once famous for its tobacco. They are generally mild cigars, with a bit of wood and grass. The single example to appear previously on The Harem was 2003’s Extravaganza, smoked as part of my Colección Habanos roundup. It came in a mediocre 7th out of 10.

For the quintessential, entry level Hoyo, to which I shall compare all the exotics, I have selected the Epicure No. 1. It’s a corona gorda, and is as popular as any Hoyo. Normally they wear a second band, but mine has lost hers, a tithe to the god of plain packaging.

I light it, and the early notes are of mid-strength, vaguely sour tobacco. Somewhere in there there is a slight note of something chemical. It doesn’t overwhelm: just a little hint of Cuaba coming through. The aftertaste is quite pleasant. Buttery.

December 6th 2016 began like most days. I woke up late, and had a leisurely shower. I did a few push-ups, and drank my nutrient slurry, and by mid-morning had wandered into the office, where I noticed that my email wasn’t working. This in itself was not entirely unusual. Since some time in the early 2000s I have run my own email server, and from time to time, things happen. Most usually, the hard disk on the server fills up, and manual intervention is needed to clear things out, but occasionally the hosting company goes down for maintenance or something along those lines. I tried to log into the server, but it wasn’t responding, so I went to the Hotmail account that I use when other emails fail to see if they had sent me a downtime notice or anything. There was an email there, and it was brief and to the point.

Dear Mr. Groom,

Earlier today the server hosting your VPS crashed, and the backup could not be recovered. It has been reset. You will be refunded for downtime (approximately 8 hours) on a prorata basis.

They provided a new username and password, and when I logged in it was as they had described. The server was as a new, virgin install. CubanCigarWebsite, with its 40 gigabytes of files, was erased, along with all 125,000 words of Dusky Beauties, my personal website, the website I had in high-school, the site where I posted my erotic fiction in the early 2000s, my cocktail recipe database, my Michael Jackson fan site, the website for my friend’s home portraiture business: all were gone. My four email servers, with 10 years of correspondence, both private and professional, erased. It amounted to the complete annihilation of my lifetime creative output.

Denial, as always, was my first response. Computer data is rarely ever completely lost. In the very worst case, if even a portion of a disk drive survives, it can be picked over by men in white coats with microscopes. There was no indication that the loss was caused by a fire at the data-centre, so most likely it could be recovered with considerably less effort than that. I fired off a help desk ticket: priority 1, urgent. It would be the first of many. Their reply was similar to their original email: apologetic but nonchalant, and absolutely clear that the data would not be coming back. I fired off an increasingly panicked response, but my hope was starting to fade. It felt like it was time to call Trevor.

At the midpoint the cigar is light-to-mid strength, with dry straw alongside freshly cut lumbar. There is a bit of a herbal taste there that leaves a tang on the back of the tongue.

In 2008 I was a bare neophyte in the world of Cuban cigars, when I found myself in a blind tasting contest. I had no business being there, as my experience was far too narrow, and I knew that whatever I picked was going to be a guess, but I wanted to at least make it an educated guess. I headed to CubanCigarWebsite.com, which was then (as now), the best online reference for Cuban cigars. The site at that time was flat HTML. Each cigar appeared in several locations that would all have to be updated manually, and most importantly, it wasn’t searchable. If you had the approximate dimensions of a cigar, and wanted everything that fit within that, it just wasn’t possible.

And so I emailed Trevor, the proprietor, and suggested that he put a database behind the site. In not so many words he replied: “good idea. Why don’t you do it.”

And so I did.

For the next four years we worked on the site together, our relationship pretty similar to your standard consulting gig. Once in a while Trev would have an idea for a change, and I would implement it. Every now and again he’d send a few cigars my way. It was at least three years and 150,000 words of emails before we ever met in person.

Between 2012 and 2014 Trevor gradually retired to a quiet life of philately, and I took over the running of the thing. I have changed very little during my tenure, beyond keeping it up to date and adding the odd technical feature. The truth is that by the time of Trev’s retirement, the site was basically complete, and could remain forever as a legacy to his efforts. Cuban cigar smoking is not a field that has changed terribly much over the last 500 years. Every year some more special releases come out, and once every 20 years or so there is an event of historical significance, but other than that, there isn’t a lot of innovation: most of the time, you still light them at the foot and puff from head.

It was not an easy call to make. Once I’d passed on the news that everything was gone, and unlikely to be recovered, Trev and I tried to make small talk, but we were both too shaken up to think of anything to say. All in all the call lasted about three minutes.

Later that night I went to a concert with an old friend. When she asked me how my day was I told her that I’d lost everything I’d ever created in my life. She asked how I felt. “Empty.” I replied.

Into the final third, and the cigar is much unchanged: grass and sap, with a woody element and the strongly tannic tang of tang of cheap sauv blanc. It is starting to get bitter, which does not bode at all well for the smoke to come.

Like most things, it all worked out in the end. After I circulated an impassioned essay about the situation to the cigar community, there were a great many offers of assistance. My donation link saw more use than it had for the entirety of its existence. Technical experts had recovery advice. Lawyers were willing to send letters to the hosting company.

Most importantly, several people came forward offering me complete (if slightly out of date) copies of the site they had made “so they could browse it locally.” It was suspicious, but it saved me. Between February and April, I rewrote the backend software of the site, and then built a bot to repopulate it from the copies. Dusky Beauties was restored a little later, largely from caching sites and my own archives. My email was all still on my computer, and I was smart enough to back it all up before it resynced with the new blank servers. Not everything was saved. My rants about the faculty at my high-school and clumsy erotica of my early 20s were lost to the dust of all things. But perhaps that is for the best.

The Epicure No. 1 ends better than expected, grassy and nutty, and with the bitterness lurking just out of the fore-palate, I never once feel the need to spit or take a sip of water. In the end, this is not an overly complex cigar, with no flavour ever really emerging that could overpower mid-tobacco and vague grassiness, and barely any change throughout its passage. I’d take a Monte 4 over this, and a PSD4, and even a Romeo Petit Coronas. Between this and the Upmann Petite Coronas there’s not a lot in it. Both are inoffensive but unremarkable. Pick whichever is closest.

One final note: once removed, the band bears a size mark for a 50-52 ring cigar: curious on a 46-ring gage smoke. I guess they were out that day.

And so, with the hungry wolf of winter closing its maw around my windpipe, the fourth season of A Harem of Dusky Beauties must now conclude. My ashtray will lay fallow for a while, in the hope that it may someday bring forth a stronger crop. I hope that the last six months have brought you joy and education.

The Harem shall return someday, of course – perhaps on a morning when the river, engorged by the meltwaters of spring, floods its banks and threatens the integrity of my humidor; or when, awakened by the sound of gay singing outside my window, I adjourn to the veranda with a Petite Corona, and watched the parade of milkmaids on their way to work; or when, sitting on a restaurant patio with some paramour, she wrinkles her nose in distaste as the aroma of fine Havana leaf wafts from the table a ways over. “Excuse me,” I will tenderly whisper, removing my napkin. “There’s somewhere I would rather be.”

I have found myself at a young people’s party – a twenty-second birthday, no less. The birthday boy is one of the young people from my office, and he was most emphatic that I come, and so here I am in his parent’s house, hovering awkwardly like a middle aged creep. The youth are different to how I remember them. The skirts are shorter, for one.

The biggest shock at this party is that people are smoking, and smoking indoors, a habit I thought disappeared with the generation before mine. I consider, for a moment, lighting up one of the cigars that is in my pocket, but dismiss the idea as far too obnoxious, until the birthday boy wanders over with a tin of Wee Willem cigarillos. “Hey man, you want a cigar?” he asks. “I know they’re probably not as your usual thing, I tried to get some real ones but I couldn’t find any.” On the spur of the moment I offer him a deal. “Son,” I say, proffering the contents of my jacket pocket. “This is a Cohiba Espléndidos. This is Saddam Hussein’s favourite cigar. It is as good a cigar as you can smoke in life. I’ll give you one, on condition that I can smoke the other in your house. Some of your guests are going to complain. It’s going to stink up your parent’s curtains. You’re going to get into trouble. I don’t recommend you take this deal.”

“Fuck yeah” he replies. “That cigar looks dope.”

The large cigar begins exceptionally smoothly; very light tobacco with umami mushroom notes, and miso soup, alongside the usual dry straw. It has a tighter draw, which for me is perfect, but I suspect might be a bit much for these twenty-two year olds. They seem to be enjoying it though. By the time my cigar has burnt through the first inch, theirs has passed through half-a-dozen pairs of lips and been featured in as many selfies.

Growing up as a nerd at an all-boys-school, I was seventeen before I attended my first real party: a party with girls and booze and dope and no adult supervision. A party where nobody was playing video games, and nobody got picked up by their parents at 10:30. A party with strangers. Alistair, who went to a different all-boys-school than I and who I knew vaguely socially, invited me. “You’re a classy guy, right? I’ve been seeing this girl, Jessica, and I want to take her to a party this weekend, but she’ll only come if she can bring her friend, so I need you to take care of the friend.”

Jessica, as it turned out, was stunning, and her friend Lauren not much her lesser, but the real eye opener was the party. It was like I had stepped into a different world. At the parties I usually went to we drank Coke and ate pizza and occasionally played laser tag. There were girls there, but they were pimply creatures with braces. These girls were another beast entirely. They wore makeup, and showed cleavage. One of them had her older sister’s ID, and bought us a bottle of Vodka and raspberry soda to mix it with. I watched awestruck as Jessica, a cigarette hanging from her lips, cut up a bowl of pot, casually sprayed it with fly spray to “make it burn better,” and rolled it into joints. When we smoked them I didn’t really feel anything, but I giggled along with the others.

Most miraculous of all was that the girls seemed to like me. I was as unique a butterfly to them as they were to me; they were used to suburban thugs, and here was a polite guy who didn’t just clown around with his mates and was amused by things other than his own flatulence. They listened in awe to my tales of boyhood in China and Papua New Guinea. As much as they were women to me, to them I was a man.

I had an ‘official’ girlfriend at the time, whom I held hands on the train in the morning and occasionally made out with in the park after school, but after the party she seemed like an artefact of a bygone era. I broke up with her over the phone, and started getting on at a different carriage.

I started hanging out with my new crew almost every weekend, drinking and smoking and loitering in the way teenagers do. I started dating Lauren, more or less by default, but as the months went by I started to wonder if I hadn’t made the wrong choice. Jessica was not only hotter, but she was funnier, and maybe even a little smarter. It turned out that Alistair had misrepresented their relationship as well. He was obsessed with her, certainly, and wanted to date her, but she was very clear on the matter: she wasn’t interested in him.

By the midpoint of the Espléndidos the saltiness is gone, replaced by a sweet caramel vanilla bean. The grassiness remains. The tobacco is still extremely light – this cigar is approximately the same age as the Lanceros I smoked recently, and yet, somehow, this thicker cigar has even more delicate a flavour profile. The birthday boy’s cigar seems to have mainly been commandeered by one of the female guests, who is standing on the edge of the dancefloor, sipping from it blissfully. I don’t ask her for her tasting notes. One of the dancers glares at her, and makes a big show of fanning the smoke away. To another guest I observe that the end of the cigar looks very dry – usually when a cigar is passed around a party like this it ends up as a chewed up, soggy mess. “Well, a lot of the people here have very well practiced joint etiquette.”

Lauren’s chief appeal was in her glorious mane of strawberry blonde hair, so when, six months into our relationship, she dyed it the awful matt black of moody teenagers, I took the opportunity and broke up with her. For a time I was cast out of the group. Lauren and Jessica were best friends, and inseparable, but then I made my big play. I asked Jessica to come to the school formal with me. It was two months hence: a night of dinner and dancing. My first tuxedo. I would pay for her ticket and promised her a limo and a corsage. The after-party was to be a warehouse rave with unlimited alcohol. She said yes, and Lauren, the previous presumptive holder of my plus one, was furious. The girls stopped talking, and with Alastair out of the picture thanks to his rebuffed affections, Jessica and I became thick as thieves. My plan was working perfectly. At the after party, I would make her mine.

In retrospect I should have made a move on her in those two months we were best friends. She was clearly open to it. Once, when we were alone in her room she asked me why I had chosen Lauren over her the night we’d first met, and when I explained that Alistair had misled me about their relationship she laughed. “You could have had any girl at that party, you know? We were all so into you.” I should have kissed her right then, but fool that I was I stuck to my plan. I would make my big move at the formal after party. It was going to be perfect.

I thought I should introduce Jessica to some of my school friends before the big event, so the week before the formal I took her to a party of my own. It was wilder than most of our affairs – Simon Treehorn was the host, and his parents mostly left us alone in the rumpus room out back. A few people even snuck in beers. I was very clear to my friends before the event that this girl was mine, and I could see by their expressions when she walked in in her tight jeans and a low cut tank that they were impressed. For most of the night I sat with her on the couch. Most of the action at the party was centred around the Nintendo or the pool table, and the couch was off to the side, a bit above those childish pursuits. At some point I went to the bathroom, and when I came back Owen Donoghue had taken my spot, and was chatting to her. I made a show of nonchalantly watching the Nintendo game, while keeping a careful eye on the couch, where they seemed to be getting on awfully well. Within an hour they were making-out. As I watched them, my fists balled in impotent rage, I realised my mistake. I had introduced a girl who liked me to a bunch of guys who were exactly the same as I was.

She came to the formal wearing my corsage, but she was really Owen’s date. She was seated next to me for dinner, but never stopped making eyes at him. I made a point of taking her to dance, but as soon as a slow song came on he wandered over. “Mind if I cut in.” At the after party I watched in misery as they made-out and dry-humped in the corner, somehow not able to look away.

There are two things you have to know in life if you want to get the girl: never hesitate and never listen to your friends when they tell you to back off.

As you’d expect from a cigar this size, the Espléndidos gets earthy toward the end, with notes of ash and wildfire, and medium-strong tobacco. There is a mild sting from the tar, but it’s nothing a sip of beer can’t placate. Burn has been razor sharp the entire way. I observe the discarded nub of the other cigar in an ashtray, consumed to just above the band. Personally, I like to take my cigars until I burn my fingers, but five and a half inches is not a bad effort for a bunch of novice smokers.

If I have any minor criticism of this cigar, it’s that it was almost too smooth: there was a bit of a lack of flavour. Compared against the Lanceros, both are elegant, delicious cigars, but the Lanceros has a touch more complexity, and I’d take one of those over the Espy for that reason. Still a great cigar though.

The Cohiba Lanceros. If you ask the head of Habanos SA what the flagship Cuban cigar is, he will probably tell you the BHK56, or maybe the Siglo VI; to me it will always be the Cohiba Lanceros. The legend goes that in 1963, Fidel Castro observed one of his bodyguards smoking a long, thin, elegant cigar (that the bodyguards of one of the most assassination liable people on earth got to lounge around smoking cigars in full view of their boss gives you a good image of how things went in early ‘60s Cuba). Intrigued by the shape he asked what it was, and the man told him it was one of his friend Eduardo’s custom rolls, and offered him one. Castro smoked it, loved it, and had Eduardo summoned and set up in El Laguito, a repossessed mansion in the suburbs, to roll the personal cigars of El Presidente. Eventually the cigars were named Cohiba, and were made available to well-connected party men, and given out as diplomatic gifts. In the 70s they were very occasionally sold to tourists on Cubana flights and, in 1984, they went on sale to the general public (Castro had quit smoking the year before, leading to a surplus in high end tobacco).

With a kiss from a jet lighter the cigar smoking begins. The first flavours are very crisp and light, with lactic, creamy notes and the tang of fresh cut grass. In the aftertaste there is an unmistakable honey sweetness. The tobacco is very light in the first few puffs, but a centimetre or so it thickens to medium. This particular Lanceros is from 2008. The ash is dirty grey, and doesn’t hold very well, flaking off with regularity. The draw and burn are perfect.

These days, I am well enough connected in the international community of cigar aficionados that I could probably get a tour of El Laguito if I were ever in Havana, but in 2006 it was not so. Back then, I was a cigar neophyte. I had smoked precisely one Cohiba, which was almost certainly a fake (a friend knew I had an interest in cigars, and brought me back a Cohiba from Mexico [never a good sign]. I smoked it in a storm water drain where I used to hang out sometimes [that’s another story]. As I recall it burned down the core the whole way – never having encountered this before, I didn’t know to fix it [slight touch of flame around the edge] and, assuming it was some kind of high end smokeless tobacco, let it go, noting that the flavour was “very smooth”). Somehow, however, I had heard of the old mansion, and while I was in Cuba I made a personal point of visiting.

It took a while to get the taxi driver to figure out where I wanted to go, but after I had tried the name in several different pronunciations, tried “Cohiba,” and “bueno tobacco fábrica,” and pulled out my guidebook for a map, we eventually had meeting of the minds. “Ah, El Laguito,” he cried delightedly. “La fábrica de tobacco Cohiba! Bueno!” and off we went.

Today El Laguito is a bit tarted up, with big Cohiba logos on the outside, but in 2006 it was a nondescript mansion in a leafy neighbourhood, with no indication at all that industry was taking place inside. A high fence surrounded it, and the only point of entry seemed to be via a ramshackle corrugated iron annex. Entering we found a group of women sitting around chatting. They were not accustomed to dealing with random gringo walk-ins, and after a bit of “bueno tobacco fábrica tour,” they found someone with a little English. The newcomer told us that this was a factory, and to visit we would need permission from Tabacuba, the tobacco ministry. She drew us a map. As we walked out I remarked to my friend that we were the dumbest bastards in the world. It was the perfect opportunity to offer a 20CUC note and ask dumbly “¿permiso?”

At the midpoint the Lanceros has mellowed, returning to very light. The predominant flavours are grass and straw, with a hint of the barnyard. In the aftertaste there are sweet fruit elements, a touch of citrus and raisins. The lactic cream has more or less vanished.

The Tabacuba office marked on the map was a few kilometres away, close to central Havana, but it was a nice day so we decided to walk it, taking in the shady streets of colonial mansions and embassies that surround El Laguito. We reached the office around 2:30pm, when the after lunch slump was definitely in effect. There was nobody in reception, but after ringing a bell we finally roused a security guide, who eventually conjured up an English speaker, who was very bemused that we might want to visit the legendary factory. “This is just a factory” he told us. “Not for tourists.” With a suspicious glare he lowered his voice. “You are journalists?” Knowing that journalists are not always looked upon kindly in Cuba, I assured him that we weren’t. Eventually he told us that he didn’t see an issue, but also that he couldn’t give us the permit here, and instead wrote down the name of a man to see at the Tabacuba office in Old Havana. He drew us a map.

The next office was closed by the time we got there (about 4:30pm), and I was preoccupied for the next few days with other tourist jaunts, but eventually returned, and presented the girl at the desk with the name of the man the clerk had written down for me. I waited for 30 minutes or so in a dingy waiting room, before eventually being ushered into a messy office. The man was very suspicious, asking me first if I was a journalist, and then listing off the names of publications he thought I might write for. After I refuted all of them he tried a different tact, and began listing tobacco companies. When that line of enquiry was exhausted he asked for my passport, and thoughtfully inspected every page, rubbing each stamp and visa between his thumb and forefinger, as if trying to establish whether or not my Japanese entry permit from two years earlier was a forgery.

Finally satisfied, he took my passport with him, and disappeared into another room for thirty minutes or so. From my seat my eyes searched around the room for the one-way mirror or concealed camera, sure I was being observed by the Cuban Secret Police. Eventually the bureaucrat returned, and presented me a long document in Spanish, with an official red stamp on it. “Your permission,” he told me. “You got to El Laguito on this date,” indicating a date about a month hence. “No, no” I said in dismay. “I’m leaving Cuba at the end of the week.” His patience for me exhausted, he shook his head. “This date is not negotiable.”

And so I left, and left Cuba, having never got further into El Laguito than the guardhouse. I did learn a lesson, however, one which would serve me well during my China years, and further travels: when dealing with a second world bureaucracy, as soon as things start to go against you: bribe everybody.

As the Cohiba Lanceros reaches its final third it gets milder still, just the lightest of tobacco flavour, over a subtle coffee, leather, and a hint of new tennis balls. It is only once I have smoked past the band that it gets a little punchy, the ash causing me to salivate. I have brought down a bottle of the high end Bundaberg rum, but forgot to bring a glass, so haven’t touched it until now. The tar on my palate is unpleasant enough that I swig from the bottle to cut it. Like all Bundy it has a bit of a paint thinner taste to it, but it cuts the tar nicely.

Anyway, the Cohiba Lanceros is a fantastic, elegant and subtle cigar, that brings to mind a more civilized age. Smoke more Cohiba Lanceros.